Digital Commons Network^™

Automated Contingency Management For Water Recycling System, Shijie Tang

Theses and Dissertations

NASA’s exploration program envisions the utilization of a Deep Space Habitat (DSH) for human exploration of the space environment in the vicinity of Mars and beyond. Communication latency and extreme limitations of power and life-supporting resources make it imperative to operate the DSH systems in a highly autonomous fashion. One such system is the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) which needs to be monitored and optimized to support its designated missions.

Integrated System Health Management (ISHM) technologies have been developed in the past decades to provide a real-time assessment of system health and use this information to improve …

On The Spectral Theory Of Linear Differential-Algebraic Operators With Periodic Coefficients, Bader Alshammari

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, the spectral theory of linear differential algebraic equations (DAEs) is considered in detail and extended to treat the weighted spectral theory which generalizes the classical theory, i.e., we develop the spectral theory for the most general DAEs: J df dt + Hf = λWf, (0.0.1) where J is a constant nonzero skew-Hermitian n×n-matrix, both H and W are dperiodic Hermitian n×n-matrices with Lebesgue measurable functions as entries, and W is positive semidefinite and invertible for a.e. t ∈ R (i.e., Lebesgue almost everywhere). Under weakest hypotheses on H and W currently known, called the local index-1 hypotheses, …

The Crt Of Black Lives Matter, Angela Onwuachi-Willig

Faculty Scholarship

Critical Race Theory ("CR T"), or at least its principles, stands at the core of most prominent social movements of today-from the resurgence of the #MeToo Movement, which was founded by a Black woman, Tarana Burke, to the Black Lives Matter Movement, which was founded by three Black women: Opal Tometi, Alicia Garza, and Patrisse Cullors. In fact, Critical Race Theorists have long defined CRT itself as a movement, one that has not only provided theoretical interventions regarding the relationship between race, racism, power, and the law, but that has also encouraged and, in fact, inspired and guided social movements. …

The Humanities Strike Back: (E)Esg And Justice Strine Challenge Gamer Shareholder Primacy, David H. Webber

Faculty Scholarship

Leo E. Strine, Jr. is closing in on Blair and Stout for the undisputed title of all-time top-scoring stakeholderist.³ I don't intend to squander this opportunity to roast and toast him by weighing the pros and cons of basketscoring primacy. Instead, my aim is to surface an overlooked argument in the debate over shareholder primacy and stakeholderism, the case for which has been recently reinvigorated by Strine's work. My argument is this: one underappreciated aspect of shareholder primacy's appeal is that it creates a competition with a single endpoint, basically a game, and that the exhilarating tournament that results, …

Jd-Next: A Randomized Experiment Of An Online Scalable Program To Prepare Diverse Students For Law School, Katherine Cheng, Jessica Findley, Adriana Cimetta, Heidi Burross, Matt Charles, Cayley Balser, Ran Li, Christopher Robertson

Faculty Scholarship

As one of two companion papers, this article explains our efforts to create and evaluate a program called JD-Next, which exposed students to legal education, prepared them to succeed, and assessed their ability to do so. JD-Next is a fully online, noncredit, seven-and-a-half-week course to train potential JD students in case reading and analysis skills before their first year of law school. This article focuses on rigorously testing the exposure and preparation functions of this program in 2019 to determine whether participation in such a course can improve law school confidence and performance of matriculating students. In the companion article, …

(Un)Stable Bits, Cree Jones, Weijia Rao

Faculty Scholarship

In November 2018, after more than a year of negotiations by representatives from Canada, Mexico, and the United States, the United States Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) was signed by leaders from the three member states, replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Trump Administration viewed the successful renegotiation of NAFTA as one of its signature achievements and argued that the USMCA “solves the many deficiencies and mistakes in NAFTA.” One of the key revisions in the USMCA was the partial removal of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), the primary mechanism that had been used to enforce the investor protections guaranteed …

Four Privacy Stories And Two Hard Cases, A Comment On Skinner-Thompson's Privacy At The Margins, Jessica Silbey

Faculty Scholarship

Scott Skinner-Thompson's new book, Privacy at the Margins, is what I would call a "fourth-generation" study of privacy law. Privacy's contours and justifications have been debated over the course of the twentieth century, first to establish it as a matter deserving legal protection (roughly the first half of the twentieth century), ² then to iterate its various common law and constitutional variations (starting in the 1960s), ³ and since the computer and internet revolution of the 1990s, to reevaluate privacy's growing importance but waning presence in the digitally-networked age.⁴ The third-generation of privacy scholarship has been a fast-growing area …

Killing Rarity, Shahrokh Falati

Articles & Chapters

On May 22, 2019, Botswana decided after many years to lift its ban on hunting elephants and in February 2020 held its first auctions for the right to hunt elephants. This turnaround change in their law coincides with a rapidly changing legal landscape in the United States related to the practice of trophy hunting of rare, intelligent animals, including elephants. This Article analyzes the fluid legal landscape surrounding this uncommon form of hunting of rare animals and possible ways of using the Administrative Procedures Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act as a means of challenging the government’s rapidly changing …

Anti-Speech Acts And The First Amendment, Richard K. Sherwin

Articles & Chapters

In many states today, there are laws on the books designed to protect the legitimacy and fairness of elections by barring the knowing or reckless dissemination of demonstrably false statements. Regulating this kind of deliberate deception protects the public against the erosion of First Amendment freedoms – such as the freedom to think and express one’s own thoughts and to meaningfully deliberate in an electoral process free from deliberate efforts to flood the zone of public discourse with confusion and mistrust based on deliberate and provable falsehoods. Some of these regulations, however, have been successfully challenged on First Amendment grounds. …

The Distant Ships Of Liberty: Why Criminology Needs To Take Seriously International Human Rights Laws That Apply To Persons With Disabilities, Michael L. Perlin, Alison Lynch, Kelly Frailing, Ashley Juneau

Articles & Chapters

Persons institutionalized in forensic psychiatric facilities have been hidden from the public view for decades – physically, socially, and legally. The forensic population also faces multiple forms of discrimination, both for their criminal history and mental illness. This reality must be radically reconsidered in light of the ratification of the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), the first legally binding instrument devoted to the comprehensive protection of the rights of persons with disabilities. There has been, however, virtually no attention paid by criminologists to the potential impact of this Convention on forensic populations. In this …

Making Me Ill: Environmental Racism And Justice As Disability, Britney Wilson

Articles & Chapters

Civil rights legal scholars and practitioners have lamented the constraints of the largely intent-based legal framework required to challenge racial discrimination and injustice. As a result, they have sought alternative methods that seemingly require less overt proof of discrimination and are more equipped to address structural harm. One of these proposed solutions involves the use of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)—due to its affirmative mandate to address discrimination by reasonable modification or accommodation—and the framing of issues of racial injustice in terms of disability or the deprivation of medical rights. Environmental justice, an area in which issues of both …

Lfa-1 Activation Enriches Tumor-Specific T Cells In A Cold Tumor Model And Synergizes With Ctla-4 Blockade, Amber Hickman, Joost Koetsier, Trevin Kurtanich, Michael C Nielsen, Glenn Winn, Salah-Eddine Bentebibel, Simone Punt, Leila Williams, Cara Haymaker, Charles B Chesson, Faisal Fa'ak, Ana L Dominguez, Richard Jones, Isere Kuiatse, Amy R Caivano, Sayadeth Khounlo, Navin D Warier, Upendra Marathi, Robert V Market, Ronald J Biediger, John W Craft, Patrick Hwu, Michael A Davies, Darren G Woodside, Peter Vanderslice, Adi Diab, Willem W Overwijk, Yared Hailemichael

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

The inability of CD8+ effector T cells (Teffs) to reach tumor cells is an important aspect of tumor resistance to cancer immunotherapy. The recruitment of these cells to the tumor microenvironment (TME) is regulated by integrins, a family of adhesion molecules that are expressed on T cells. Here, we show that 7HP349, a small-molecule activator of lymphocyte function-associated antigen-1 (LFA-1) and very late activation antigen-4 (VLA-4) integrin cell-adhesion receptors, facilitated the preferential localization of tumor-specific T cells to the tumor and improved antitumor response. 7HP349 monotherapy had modest effects on anti-programmed death 1-resistant (anti-PD-1-resistant) tumors, whereas combinatorial treatment with anti-cytotoxic …

Leveraging Single-Cell Sequencing To Unravel Intratumour Heterogeneity And Tumour Evolution In Human Cancers, Amy L Bowes, Maxime Tarabichi, Nischalan Pillay, Peter Van Loo

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Intratumour heterogeneity (ITH) and tumour evolution are well-documented phenomena in human cancers. While the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies has facilitated the large-scale capture of genomic data, the field of single-cell genomics is nascent but rapidly advancing and generating many new insights into the complex molecular mechanisms of tumour biology. In this review, we provide an overview of current single-cell DNA sequencing technologies, exploring how recent methodological advancements have enumerated new insights into ITH and tumour evolution. Areas highlighted include the potential power of single-cell genome sequencing studies to explore evolutionary dynamics contributing to tumourigenesis through to progression, metastasis, and …

Targeting Syndecan-1: New Opportunities In Cancer Therapy, Zecheng Yang, Shuaitong Chen, Haoqiang Ying, Wantong Yao

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Syndecan-1 (SDC1, CD138) is one of the heparan sulfate proteoglycans and is essential for maintaining normal cell morphology, interacting with the extracellular and intracellular protein repertoire, as well as mediating signaling transduction upon environmental stimuli. The critical role of SDC1 in promoting tumorigenesis and metastasis has been increasingly recognized in various cancer types, implying a promising potential of utilizing SDC1 as a novel target for cancer therapy. This review summarizes the current knowledge on SDC1 structure and functions, including its role in tumor biology. We also discuss the highlights and limitations of current SDC1-targeted therapies as well as the obstacles …

Novel Scoring Systems To Predict The Need For Oxygenation And Icu Care, And Mortality In Hospitalized Covid-19 Patients: A Risk Stratification Tool, Ashish D Upadhyay, Shubham Sahni, Chaithra Rajanna

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

INTRODUCTION: A rapid surge in cases during the COVID-19 pandemic can overwhelm any healthcare system. It is imperative to triage patients who would require oxygen and ICU care, and predict mortality. Specific parameters at admission may help in identifying them.

METHODOLOGY: A prospective observational study was undertaken in a COVID-19 ward of a tertiary care center. All baseline clinical and laboratory data were captured. Patients were followed till death or discharge. Univariable and multivariable logistic regression was used to find predictors of the need for oxygen, need for ICU care, and mortality. Objective scoring systems were developed for the same …

Algorithmic Approach To The Diagnosis Of Organizing Pneumonia: A Correlation Of Clinical, Radiologic, And Pathologic Features, Diane Stover, Akhilesh Mahajan, Michael Esposito, Bushra Mina, Viera Lakticova, Stuart L Cohen, Nestor L Muller, Jenna Schulner, Rakesh Shah, Suhail Raoof

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Organizing pneumonia (OP), characterized histopathologically by patchy filling of alveoli and bronchioles by loose plugs of connective tissue, may be seen in a variety of conditions. These include but are not limited to after an infection, drug reactions, radiation therapy, and collagen vascular diseases. When a specific cause is responsible for this entity, it is referred to as "secondary OP." When an extensive search fails to reveal a cause, it is referred to as "cryptogenic OP" (previously called "bronchiolitis obliterans with OP"), which is a clinical, radiologic, and pathologic entity classified as an interstitial lung disease. The clinical presentation of …

Reshaping The Tumor Microenvironment With Oncolytic Viruses, Positive Regulation Of The Immune Synapse, And Blockade Of The Immunosuppressive Oncometabolic Circuitry, Yisel Rivera-Molina, Hong Jiang, Xuejun Fan, Joy Gumin, Frederick F Lang, Christopher Alvarez-Breckenridge, Filipa Godoy-Vitorino, Lisha Zhu, W Jim Zheng, Lijie Zhai, Erik Ladomersky, Kristen L Lauing, Marta M Alonso, Derek A Wainwright, Candelaria Gomez-Manzano, Juan Fueyo

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Background: Oncolytic viruses are considered part of immunotherapy and have shown promise in preclinical experiments and clinical trials. Results from these studies have suggested that tumor microenvironment remodeling is required to achieve an effective response in solid tumors. Here, we assess the extent to which targeting specific mechanisms underlying the immunosuppressive tumor microenvironment optimizes viroimmunotherapy.

Methods: We used RNA-seq analyses to analyze the transcriptome, and validated the results using Q-PCR, flow cytometry, and immunofluorescence. Viral activity was analyzed by replication assays and viral titration. Kyn and Trp metabolite levels were quantified using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. Aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AhR) activation …

Torturous Journeys: Cruelty, International Law, And Pushbacks And Pullbacks Over The Mediterranean Sea, Jamal Barnes

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Boat pushbacks and pullbacks by Italy and the European Union (EU) have returned migrants and refugees to Libya where they have been subjected to brutal human rights violations, such as torture and ill-treatment. This article argues that these pushbacks and pullbacks not only undermine key human rights principles, but they are also an act of cruelty. As Italy and the EU have used the law to evade their international human rights and refugee obligations, the law has had distributive effects that have shaped migration pathways and exacerbated the vulnerability of migrants and refugees to torture. Not only have legal manoeuvres …

Using Constraint Programming And Graph Representation Learning For Generating Interpretable Cloud Security Policies, Mikhail Kazdagli, Mohit Tiwari, Akshat Kumar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern software systems rely on mining insights from business sensitive data stored in public clouds. A data breach usually incurs signifcant (monetary) loss for a commercial organization. Conceptually, cloud security heavily relies on Identity Access Management (IAM) policies that IT admins need to properly confgure and periodically update. Security negligence and human errors often lead to misconfguring IAM policies which may open a backdoor for attackers. To address these challenges, frst, we develop a novel framework that encodes generating optimal IAM policies using constraint programming (CP). We identify reducing dormant permissions of cloud users as an optimality criterion, which intuitively …

Proceedings Of The 13th International Workshop On Graph Computation Models (Gcm 2022), Reiko Heckel, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This volume contains the proceedings of the Thirteenth International Workshop on Graph Computation Models (GCM 2022) , which was held in Nantes, France on 6th July 2022 as part of the STAF federation of conferences. Graphs are common mathematical structures that are visual and intuitive. They constitute a natural and seamless way for system modelling in science, engineering, and beyond, including computer science, biology, and business process modelling. Graph computation models constitute a class of very high-level models where graphs are first-class citizens. The aim of the International GCM Workshop series is to bring together researchers interested in all aspects …

Npc: Neuron Path Coverage Via Characterizing Decision Logic Of Deep Neural Networks, Xiaofei Xie, Tianlin Li, Jian Wang, Lei Ma, Qing Guo, Felix Juefei-Xu, Yang Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Deep learning has recently been widely applied to many applications across different domains, e.g., image classification and audio recognition. However, the quality of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) still raises concerns in the practical operational environment, which calls for systematic testing, especially in safety-critical scenarios. Inspired by software testing, a number of structural coverage criteria are designed and proposed to measure the test adequacy of DNNs. However, due to the blackbox nature of DNN, the existing structural coverage criteria are difficult to interpret, making it hard to understand the underlying principles of these criteria. The relationship between the structural coverage and …

An Empirical Study On Data Distribution-Aware Test Selection For Deep Learning Enhancement, Qiang Hu, Yuejun Guo, Maxime Cordy, Xiaofei Xie, Lei Ma, Mike Papadakis, Yves Le Traon

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Similar to traditional software that is constantly under evolution, deep neural networks need to evolve upon the rapid growth of test data for continuous enhancement (e.g., adapting to distribution shift in a new environment for deployment). However, it is labor intensive to manually label all of the collected test data. Test selection solves this problem by strategically choosing a small set to label. Via retraining with the selected set, deep neural networks will achieve competitive accuracy. Unfortunately, existing selection metrics involve three main limitations: (1) using different retraining processes, (2) ignoring data distribution shifts, and (3) being insufficiently evaluated. To …

Dynamic Topic Models For Temporal Document Networks, Ce Zhang, Hady Wirawan Lauw

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Dynamic topic models explore the time evolution of topics in temporally accumulative corpora. While existing topic models focus on the dynamics of individual documents, we propose two neural topic models aimed at learning unified topic distributions that incorporate both document dynamics and network structure. For the first model, by adding a time dimension, we propose Time-Aware Optimal Transport, which measures the probability of a link between two differently timestamped documents using their semantic distance. Since the gradually evolving topological structure of network may also influence the establishment of a new link, for the second model, we further design a Temporal …

Special Section: Reevaluating Markets For Information, Robert John Kauffman, Thomas A. Weber

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As the use of information as a productive and tradeable asset becomes more pervasive, its—often unintended—side-effects start showing. This prompts us to systematically recognize these effects and, once identified, to think about how to use them to our advantage or else mitigate them as much as may be economically and/or socially desirable. In this Special Section, we have assembled three research papers, which take a look at different interesting instances of this question, namely in the context of regulating peer-to-peer sharing markets, the substitution of knowledge workers (or their skills) by artificial intelligence (AI), and the difficulties in appropriating rents …

Portraits Of Leadership In Higher Education: Directors Of Centers For Teaching And Learning Leadership Styles And Dei Practices At Four-Year Universities In The U.S., Angela K. Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study aimed to examine Directors of Centers for Teaching and Learning DEI practices and understanding of leadership style within their 4-year universities in the United States. Information indicates that student enrollment of students identifying as members of historically marginalized groups is increasing and that persistent descriptions of experiences related to educational barriers negatively impact learning experiences. Integrating this information into this narrative life span study and considerations of the components of leadership identity development provided themes regarding the critical practices among higher education institutional leaders. The study presented findings that described the impact of the life span factor on …

Legislating Mandatory Reporting Of Child Abuse In India And China: A Divergence Of Legislative Choice, Wenjuan Zhang, Avaantika Chawla

Socio-Legal Review

Mandatory reporting is used as a tool for early identification of child abuse by countries around the world. However, there is variation in terms of the legislative models followed. The two models most commonly followed are universal mandatory reporting and stakeholder specific mandatory reporting. India and China joined the bandwagon and introduced legislation on mandatory reporting over a decade ago. While India has adopted the ambitious model of universal mandatory reporting, China has taken a more incremental and experimental approach with stakeholder-specific mandatory reporting. The paper aims to differentiate the legislative approaches taken by the two countries for introducing mandatory …

How Does Parents' Social Support Impact Children's Health Practice? Examining A Mediating Role Of Health Knowledge, Paulin Tay Straughan, Chengwei Xu

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Background: Many existing studies have found that social support and health knowledge positively affect an individual's health status. However, it is still unclear how parents’ social support and health knowledge influence their children’s obesity. The present study hypothesizes that parents’ health knowledge has a mediating effect on the relationship between social support and children’s health practice regarding weight management. Methods: To test the hypothesis, we conducted a questionnaire survey in Singapore and collected a nationally representative sample of 1488 household responses. Structural equation modeling (SEM) via Stata was used to examine the indirect effects of parents’ social support on children’s …

Examining The Generalizability Of Research Findings From Archival Data, Andrew Delios, Et. Al., Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This initiative examined systematically the extent to which a large set of archival research findings generalizes across contexts. We repeated the key analyses for 29 original strategic management effects in the same context (direct reproduction) as well as in 52 novel time periods and geographies; 45% of the reproductions returned results matching the original reports together with 55% of tests in different spans of years and 40% of tests in novel geographies. Some original findings were associated with multiple new tests. Reproducibility was the best predictor of generalizability—for the findings that proved directly reproducible, 84% emerged in other available time …

Regret Is Born Where Choice Dies, Shane Ryan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper analyses regret. On the basis of a number of examples, the case is made that regret is a negative affective state that has a perceived past choice as its object. More precisely, S regrets φ-ing, iff, and because (i) S has a negative affective state regarding φ-ing (Negative Affect State Requirement), the experience of which is explained by (ii) S perceiving that an alternative choice that was available to her would have been preferable to φ-ing (Perceived Forking Path Requirement). The resulting account is differentiated from Williams’ agent-regret and shown to avoid problems faced by Zeelenberg’s definition of …

Well-Being And Meaning In Life, Matthew Hammerton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Many philosophers now see meaning in life as a key evaluative category that stands alongside well-being and moral goodness. Our lives are assessed not only by how well they go for us and how morally good they are, but also by their meaningfulness. In this article, I raise a challenge to this view. Theories of meaning in life closely resemble theories of well-being, and there is a suspicion that the former collapse into the latter. I develop this challenge showing that it is formidable. I then answer it by offering a novel account of what meaning in life is and …